We’ve made it to Christmas week. I’m not sure if it’s been a long time coming or if it’s just that the timeline of groundhog year 2020 seemed to go from Christmas 2019, to the “meh January blues”, to the vague coronavirus-tinged conversations of February, to the stomach knot-inducing lockdown of March. And back to Christmas again.
Nothing seemed to happen in between and yet so much has. For one, we learned the value of human touch.
I still remember the referee at one of my son’s football matches explaining back in February that the children were not allowed to shake hands at the end of the match. “Absolute nonsense,” he grumbled to the parents on the sideline. “They’re just taking things too far, but look it’s the rules and I have to go along with them,” he continued.
The vast majority nodded in agreement. It seemed almost excessive. And anyhow it could never surely catch on. How could you stop people from physically greeting each other? It was part of our normal behaviour.
Instinctively affectionate
And yet a part of me worried, even though we needed it to, what might be the consequences of it indeed catching on. How did we teach our children, so instinctively affectionate, that they were not to physically greet their friends and family? How was I to convince my youngest children, who typically catapulted themselves at grandparents upon first sighting that they could no longer hug them? But they learned and they adjusted and this is now their norm. It’s normal for them not to see their grandparents for months on end. And it’s normal for them not to hug them when they do. That it’s normal perturbs me. It should be completely abnormal.
We also learned the value of school if ever we doubted it before. We were reminded that school is about so much more than academics. That it’s a safe place for some. And that all children and families were not affected equally by their closure. A reflection of wider society as a whole.
“Children are resilient” came the usual response to the pandemic’s demands and effects on them. A convenient platitude considering the sometimes overwhelming ask of them. And resilient they needed to be having been dubbed vectors and made feel unwelcome in certain shops and establishments. Given “side-eye” by suspicious adults when out for walks. We have a lot to ask of the manner in which it was deemed acceptable to treat children and their families.
We’re lucky. It was a stress-filled year but we’ve arrived at Christmas week relatively unscathed. Unlike some of their friends, my children will not face into a Christmas grieving the loss of a loved one. Nor have their lives been turned upside down by a parent’s unemployment. We have so much to be thankful for.
Excitement levels
The excitement levels are high and it’s contagious. On Christmas Eve, the teenagers will track Santa with their younger siblings on the Norad site as they do every year caught up in the magic of their younger siblings’ enthusiasm. The Christmas traditions will be tweaked to accommodate pandemic times and as the countdown continues things almost feel normal.
With Walton-esque proportions we’ve never been high up on anyone’s Christmas dinner invitee list. So on Christmas Day the nine of us will sit around the Christmas table as always, very grateful for our numbers – until it comes to clear up time, that is. There will be no battles over which vegetables must be consumed and chocolate will be deemed an appropriate breakfast.
There will be board games and laughter – and strops no doubt too, because it wouldn’t be Christmas otherwise. And there will be phone calls to loved ones to share details of Santa’s deliveries and to confirm that nobody got coal.
And I will sit down to watch EastEnders at some stage and marvel at how even in the season of goodwill the residents of Walford always manage to have a more miserable Christmas than the one before. All in all, surprisingly, it’s shaping up to be a rather normal Christmas Day.
The end of the year is nigh and I, like many, will be glad to see the back of it. So long, 2020, don’t let the door hit you in the arse on the way out. But I’m determined to enjoy the last few days of you anyway, trying to end on a high as we look, hopefully, to brighter days in 2021 with a vaccine on the horizon.
So let the gratitude take hold.
Merry Christmas to all and to all a good night.